It doesn't help that the central character, Amir, an expatriate Afghani writer, is played with dour lack of expression by Egyptian-born actor Khalid Abdalla, more forcefully seen taking down that doomed plane in Paul Greengrass's United 93. Instead, armed with a capably hands-off screenplay by David Benioff, he's made a drama as bland and beige as its tasteful palette, whose pacing wouldn't look out of place in the Sunday-night slot on PBS. So you'd think Forster, who made the admirably strange and lively Stranger Than Fiction, would seize the day and all manner of audience demographics with the colorful movie equivalent of a page-turner. Add to all that his tactful tiptoeing around the United States' role in arming the Taliban in Afghanistan, and you've got yourself a runaway American best-seller. Hosseini is an instinctive and unpretentious storyteller whose direct prose, transparent plot symmetries and exotic locales have made him a middlebrow unifier of reading publics high and low. ![]() Arriving on the heels of Atonement, The Kite Runner tells a parallel, if far more potboiling, tale of family secrets, betrayal, cowardice and making amends. ![]() ![]() Kites fly high over San Francisco Bay and Kabul (okay, China), but not much else soars in Marc Forster's flaccid adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's vivid 2002 novel, which covers three decades of Afghanistan's misery under serial totalitarian rule.
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